


If Only I'd Known

by RBnC



Series: Good-bye [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-13
Updated: 2014-01-13
Packaged: 2018-01-08 14:47:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1133903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RBnC/pseuds/RBnC
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock returns to the Flat after John's funeral.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If Only I'd Known

When Sherlock does get back to the flat after the funeral the silence around him is stifling. There is no shuffle of John in the kitchen. There’s no telly playing. No shower running. At first, he simply stands there, staring ahead of him. Eventually Mrs. Hudson finds him at the top of the stairs doing nothing. She leads him to his old room – the one she and John never touched – and tells him he should rest.

She offers him a cup of tea but he refuses, knowing she couldn’t make it like John.

He just sits there for a long time before deciding that this will get him nowhere. He stands up and starts tearing through the room Mrs. Hudson claimed had remained untouched.

Lies.

They had obviously let someone move in here in his absence. His belongings have been touched, rearranged, misplaced. His clothing is on the floor in heaps and his bedding – his bedding is the same, however. Slept in, but unchanged.

John slept in his bed.

Often.

Sherlock turns away, trying to find something else to preoccupy him. He’s tearing through the room when he finds his old coat – the one he’d always worn, his favorite – and he picks it up.

Not touched.

He slips it on, knowing immediately that it is indeed his old coat. He storms out of the room, intending to leave the flat and never return.

His hands find themselves in his coat pockets. He feels his old cellphone, the one he’d had to abandon after the fall, and he pulls it out, stopping in his tracks.

He presses the power button, shocked when it does in fact turn on.

The screen lights up as he makes his way down the stairs.

’71 new text’s’ it informs him.

He stops halfway down the stairs when he sees they’re all from John.

He reads them. He reads each one and the more he reads the more his heart breaks. He can hear John’s voice in his head, reading these messages to him.

Pleading with him to not be dead.

He breaks down and cries when he reads John’s final texts. He thinks about how cruel the irony is. John killed himself to be with Sherlock when he’d faked his own death to keep John alive.

He thinks that before he met John, he was the worst kind of fool.

The entire time, he’d hoped – hope, John, really? – that it was all a ruse. That John had uncovered his scheme and had entailed Mycroft and Lestrade’s help in forcing Sherlock back home.

John had said good-bye.


End file.
